Socialism in the Bedroom

Chapter 8 seeks to explain the evolution of postwar natalist thought in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies. While its approach to the developing world came to mirror many aspects of the Western approach to population politics in the Third World, the Soviet Union began to pioneer a new understanding of fertility for developed world populations and gave birth to a new neo-mercantilist discourse on fertility. Perceiving threats stemming from an aging population, a declining labor force, growing obligations to elderly populations, and ethnic others, notably Islamic peoples, the Soviets began to reintegrate pro-natalist policies into the core of state policy. Tracing how this new discourse spread from its home in academic journals to state policy, this chapter demonstrates how government came to reinhabit the wombs of the people by positing a direct relationship between threats to the health of the state and the fertility of the people.